June 2016

March 31, 2006

Why must they pile their wagons so high? They pile like 80 tons of shit on top thinking they can take it all in a single trip, but does it work? No, something inevitably falls off and crushes a little girl in her communion dress, and the ensuing commotion never fails to startle the drey horse, and the drey horse invariably takes off like a shot through the narrow streets pulling the cart and an old man who got tangled in the reins, and the wailing of the citizenry always sends the Mayor of the town running into the street, and like clockwork the drey horse and the wagon and the half-dead old man nearly run the Mayor down, causing him to drop his pince nez and put his hands to his head and shout, "Sacre Dieu! Telephone Unremitting Failure immediately!" Because that's the thing about the French: while they think nothing of piling 80 tons of shit on a wagon, they all want somebody else to interrogate the horse.

Not all Acts of God involve the deaths of thousands of people. Some Acts of God are good. We call these miracles. People love a good miracle. We know we do. What are a few thousand Act-of-God-related fatalities compared to the joy that a miracle, such as the one our pal Ben photographed recently in Littlestown, can bring to the lives of the faithful? That's not just a high school wall. That's a high school wall with Jesus's face on it! And we're here to tell you that since that face appeared on that wall, not a single student at that high school has been caught smoking pot. Not a single one. Thank you, Jesus!

That are beyond human control. We call these Acts of God. Acts of God include tornados, great floods, and falls of tennis-ball-sized hail. Very few Acts of God increase the human store of happiness. Generally, when God acts, your best bet is to run. Oddly enough, many people pray to God to save them during Acts of God. This seems kind of short-sighted. If God gave a shit about you, he wouldn't be dropping giant hail balls on your head. By praying, you're inconsiderately putting God in the awkward position of saving you from Himself. You'd be better off finding another God, one who doesn't specialize in destroying trailer homes. Like Satan. Whatever his other faults, Satan has never cut a deadly swath through a trailer park. He doesn't do natural disasters. That's the Lord's bailiwick.

Many, many women. But our wife is very clear on the fact that if should have sex with even one women, that is to say one woman besides herself, she will kill us. It's true. Our marriage is like one of those Islamic countries where adulterers are stoned to death. At first, we doubted her sincerity. Then we found the stones.

Andreas used to be Special Forces. He could kill with his hair. But now he lives in a building with a lobby and walks to the supermarket and smokes bulgarian cigarettes and, if you saw him in the hair salon where he works, you'd never know he once sucked a man's eyeballs out of his head with his mouth and then used the eyeballs to choke the man to death. Sometimes Andreas comes over to the Unremitting Failure offices in his little Italian sports car and makes impassioned speeches about Michael Bolton, about how Michael Bolton is great and we should write only good things about Michael Bolton because Michael Bolton is a force for good, as is evidence by the case of Andreas himself, who was inspired to give up professional killing after hearing Michael Bolton on the radio while on assignment in an eastern european capital he's not at liberty to name. In fact, Andreas does some singing himself, although he takes pain to make clear he is nowhere near as powerful a singer as Michael Bolton himself. One night on the way home from the video store we saw Andreas dragging a supine body into the mouth of an alley and we wondered whether he's really as "retired" as he says he is. But he does cut hair, we've watched him. He cuts it with great elan. Kind of reminds us of Morrissey's "Hairdresser on Fire," he does. He has a great natural energy and swigs bottled water with his pinky finger stuck out and shouts "Next!" in a mock-angry tone and has lots of foreign girlfriends that he dates for a couple of weeks, then has deported. His whole family, every single member of it, is dead.

Unremitting Failure would like to wish Mick Ralphs, of Mott the Hoople and Bad Company fame, a Happy Birthday. "Rock'n'roll's a loser's game," but that's okay, so long as you remember "you ain't the nazz... you're just a buzz... some kinda temporary."

We used to know this Marine who, during his time in Vietnam, put the bead on an old woman in a rice paddy and, for no reason whatsoever except boredom, pulled the trigger. He was a sweet guy, a talented sculptor and a big reader of Marcel Proust. People have illusions about war, the most fucked-up of which is it's possible train a person to kill, put them in a hostile environment, and then expect them to make rational decisions about when to pull the trigger. In war, atrocities are the coin of the realm. Americans are very blase about putting their own citizens into combat, and the result of it is that foreign people, innocents, get murdered. Then these same Americans profess shock. Shock? Anybody who knows anything about American military history knows that Americans' behavior in combat is no different than anybody else's: that is to say, cold-blooded and murderous. My Lai was no one-hit wonder. During WWII the GIs fighting the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Forest were galvanized by news of an SS massacre of some 88 American POWs at Malmedy, but the fact of the matter was that at that time and in that place American soldiers routinely shot unarmed German prisoners, either out of hand or on their way back to rear lines. And that was the Good War, for Christ's sake. Thus, it should come as no surpise that American Marines in Iraq are alleged to have recently slaughtered some 15 Iraqis, including women and children, after the explosion of a bomb killed one of their fellow soldiers. But those soldiers aren't alone in their guilt, if they are indeed guilty. They did it on our behalf, after all. We all have blood on our hands. To say this war sucks is to say they all suck, which is to say nothing at all. It's pointless. Humans are a fucked species, in love with hate and blood and rage, and too many people are too good at finding reasons to kill one another to ever expect any different. But to those of you who wanted this war, indeed ached for it, we say, Fuck you. And spare us the fallen heroes, "support our troops" bullshit. War doesn't produce heroes. It produces corpses. We invite you to run one of them up your flagpole.